Invest 90 - Sub Tropical Storm Alberto

The  tropical disturbance over Belize and the Yucatan has been declared to be an Invest, Investment 90L to be precise which means not that it will became a hurricane though there is a 70 percent chance, but simply that the National Hurricane Center in Mia mi is interested in the formation's progress. Aren't we all if we live remotely close to its projected landfall?

Hurricane season starts June 1st officially and runs through November 30th in the Atlantic Basin so all this activity is a little early and coming on the heels of last year's Hurricane irma fiasco it is setting nerves to jangling in the Florida Keys. I was shopping in Publix yesterday and I overheard a (loud) conversation between two women discussing their hurricane preparations. They were lamenting their lack of preparedness for Hurricane Irma last September and are determined not to be caught out this season. And already with a previous tropical depression flooding the Keys with rain we have seen a  wet start to the summer.

The thing about the Western Caribbean is that it is a heat catchment area, the waters are shallower and the heat is intense early on in that area so hurricanes which need hot water to fuel their spiralling winds. 

So  hurricanes tend to form off the Central American coast early in hurricane season and late while the waters of the Atlantic spawn mid-season storms when the ocean is warmest.

Even though forecasters try to warn us of what's ahead they can only guesstimate numbers of storms not direction of travel or landfall, so even if there are an average number of storms, as they point out it only takes one to ruin your day. Hurricane Irma with its 140 mph winds has left a trail of damage that is taking a while to repair. there are hundreds of tarps still on roofs in the Lower Keys, not so much Key West but the islands between Sugarloaf and Big Pine. Reconstruction is still underway and insurance companies aren't helping when they contest every single claim.

A  lot of people lost their homes in Irma and many left the Keys. There is a shortage of labor already in the islands though rental prices keep rising and wages don't match the increased costs so there are more people leaving for that reason.Suddenly hurricane season has become real again and the prospect of more damage, more unpaid evacuations, more chaos is causing yet more people to rethink their idea of life in paradise and you can hardly blame them. 

It may be that all we get is a ruined Memorial Day with massive rain storms, and if that is all so much the better. And if one has to be laid flat by a disaster frankly I prefer hurricanes to fires, mudslides, lava flows and earthquakes. However hurricane season is an annual event and it is relentless. I would prefer not having to sit out another catastrophe, but this is the reality of life in the Keys from time to time.

Hurricane Remnants

The notion has been announced in the newspaper that hurricane clean up roadside is complete. Except it isn't.

Friends came to visit last week from California and they remarked on the damage and debris they saw. In these cases one makes polite noises while inside one wants to scream that they should have seen it a few weeks ago. That was bad, this is nothing!

Except of course you can't do that, good manners require you to make polite noises and ask how things are going at home.  Besides you have to be mindful that California got scorched in some areas and mudslides wrecked other areas, while Puerto Rico and the Vorgin Islands are living a permanent dystopian hell.

The Florida Keys really aren't so badly off.  We have a Republican governor and in these partisan times we get better treatment from our President than if we were  a blue state. Weird but true.

Hurricane Irma only side swiped Key West with modest 140 mph winds so damage was modest, mostly trees and wires. As well as signs and some siding and so forth. Just seeing someone up a ladder with a hammer leads one to the possibly erroneous conclusion that hurricane damage is being repaired.

Some damage clearly isn't.  I have been bracing myself to go back to the worst hit areas but I have to confess Big Pine Key and Bahia Honda are hard to face. There is so much that was familiar that has been wiped out and I wonder when I'll be ready to take a look. One day I will I keep promising myself...

Hurricanes And Tourists

The newspaper says Hurricane Irma has set back tourism this winter by almost half so the county tourism people are planning an eight million dollar campaign to overcome the perception that the Keys are reduced to rubble like Puerto Rico or the Virgin Islands. The deadline was set this week to clear debris off Highway One and along the Lower Keys they are doing pretty well:

Not so long ago that stretch of the shoulder on Ramrod Key was  a giant unending heap of debris, a staging area for collection and removal. From below to above, it's gone:

It took lines of trucks to get stuff cleared away. It went on daily totalling apparently possibly four million cubic yards throughout the islands. Though how they measure it I'd don't know. By whatever standard they measure it was supposed to be five times the amount of trash generated by Hurricane Wilma in 2005 which in my memory was a breeze compared to this one.

My own main side street has been the collection point for trashed trailers at the Venture Out RV park and wrecked homes and their contents on the canals in the subdivision. Finally it's gone and now getting swept up. 

It looked ghastly for months:

For visitors to Key West there's no reason to stay away as the city is almost unscathed except for a few pieces of trim here and there and a few trees and they are honestly not noticeable by their absence in the grand scheme of things. I haven't been up the Keys for a while but a friend in Marathon says things are looking pretty normal there these days. I intend to go look. I am steeling myself to check out Bahia Honda park and the back streets of Big Pine where the greatest damage was sustained but neither place is a reason to stay away from the Keys. Not now.

Disaster Tourism

I am very relieved we are not Puerto Rico or the Virgin Islands, from whom nothing much is heard anymore. I did read that on St Johns they still have no electricity at all.This is Florida and be it ever so tenuous we are connected to the mainland. Yet this, after six weeks is how my street looks:

I have electricity, internet and air conditioning and running potable water from the faucet. Fantastic! My driveway is clear, my street is a mess. We call it Beirut-by-the-Sea, a jumble of trash, broken homes, wreckage and and rat infested piles of debris worthy of a civil war. The main road that connects our subdivision to the Highway is called Spanish Main, and here they pick up some trash and pour more in it's place:

US One, the Overseas Highway shown below as I was driving into Summerland Key is a mess. The trucks hauling wreckage spill stuff as they go and you are as likely as not to come across bits of RV parts, appliances, sheet metal wood and tree limbs as you go on the main road. Riding at night requires total alertness, even more than by day.

What makes it all so bizarre is that there is a three way public argument between the Florida Department of Transportation, responsible for highway debris, the county contractor responsible for side streets and the county. The state stays aloof and does its job meanwhile the county contractor can't get the required 200 trucks to clean the sub divisions along this hundred mile mess. He says FDOT pays too much and he can't compete with the state pay scale. He has but 78 trucks working. None have showed up on my corner of Cudjoe Key.

Imagine: this debris field stretches more or less from Mile Marker Ten a hundred miles north to Key Largo. In the newspaper county officials say they have removed 400,000 cubic yards of wreckage, as much as was generated by the hated Hurricane Wilma and its floods in 2005. They estimated there are 2 million cubic yards to clear this time around-  five times as much. And the county contract says my street should be clean by next weekend...No chance.

It just doesn't end. there's always something going wrong. There are no working gas stations on Summerland or Ramrod and only one in Big Pine. Think about this: cable television has been absent from much of the Keys since the storm. My neighbors got their first technician visit from Comcast last Saturday. We've had AT&T internet in my house for three weeks (we watch streaming TV) so we are lucky. Things just aren't getting done in some areas and as much as we cannot blame we cannot feel good about this chaos. I have seen societal collapse and I did not like it. Losing water, electricity, phone and medical services, fire protection and law enforcement all at once was  a lot to handle.

This Mount Trashmore on Ramrod Key is the scene of multiple trucks and excavators loading up every single day but the pile never shrinks. There's a bigger one at Summerland Key and a vast such pile in Marathon. It's endless. We have to give up the pretense that this lot will be cleared in anything less than months. Meanwhile it rains and smells mature.

I am not one of those who cares if people come by to photograph our misery though I have seen posts on Facebook protesting disaster tourists as though they should refrain. I understand the fascination but I would like amateur photojournalists either to not slow down or pull completely out of the way as they photograph our precious trash piles. I am so used to driving past wrecked homes and exploded RV trailers and piles of garbage I barely notice them. But I do notice people slowing me down as they crawl by fascinated by the detritus of lives upended by a Category Four storm.

There's plenty of crap to stare at too. And I'm not showing the houses torn apart, the subdivisions submerged in mud. Here is the refuse of all that destruction. This trash represents workers who can no longer live in the Keys and do their work. People living in FEMA hotels kicked out to make way for better paying tourists. 

They say flying the flag upside down is a symbol of distress. Well, we have lots of streets signs doing the same thing. I hope someone with authority to do something notices.

FEMA trailers, expedited housing permits, and those tourist dollars we crave being spent to rebuild our local small businesses. That would be nice.

Irma In Big Pine

The center of the storm went over the Keys somewhere between Cudjoe Key and Big Pine. 

Home to many trailers. 

The National Guard brought supplies:

Winn Dixie offered air conditioning serenity and wi fi.

Irma Pictures

A few pictures as permitted by our very limited bandwidth. 

Holding Pattern

I left my house shuttered and as secure as possible with my car parked at the top of the hill under the house and my Bonneville motorcycle snug in front of it. My hill top driveway is by Keys standards a good long way above sea level so much so my neighbor wants to park his car alongside mine for the duration. No problem I said, as you do.

The worry now is that with winds from this monstrous hurricane aiming somewhere between Miami and Marathon the hurricane will bring huge sea surge, more saltwater than was pushed ashore by Hurricane Wilma in 2005 so everyone who remembers is freaked out and those who don't remember are picking up the vibe from those of us who were there.

                                                                          City of Key West picture
No one likes living inside a house with hurricane shutters over the windows and if you haven't done it you should to never have to. It's weird, like being in prison as friend said yesterday. Plus you have to have the lights on all day. Plus you plants are all in the living room and your outdoor furniture is piled in the office and you just have to ignore it all.

I got up at eleven as usual after a night's work and went into town, 25 miles from my house, to take an exercise class. But first I visited some tourist attractions and took my picture.

Other locals were there too and I got my picture taken at Mile Marker Zero.

Then I went to exercise and rode home through a deserted town and on a deserted highway.

There were a few cars around but it was weird. The highway was a bit of a race course with the few cars on the road speeding like I wish they'd speed on work days. I was ambling along enjoying the day in no hurry and cars hurtled past me like the chariots of hell were on their heels. I was quite impressed by their performance but I stuck to the 55 mph I was enjoying. 

And it was a gorgeous day in every respect. A light breeze bright sunshine and puffy clouds. My chores were done and I went for a swim in the canal. By the time my fingers were wrinkly I went upstairs to brew some tea and settled into my rocking chair for an hour drying off in the shade. Then I took a nap. I realized a hurricane watch was declared but I decided to enjoy my day on my own time and it was perfect. 

The storm has been marked as heading toward Miami but there is a lot of concern it could head closer to Key West but as far as I'm concerned what is, is. I'm slated to work and this opportunity to be home, in a silent neighborhood with no one to please but myself was fantastic. I put Mozart on the phone speaker and it was so quiet I could swim and hum along to the phone sitting on the deck above my head.

Of course I had a glitch. I did my laundry and set my uniform to dry on the balcony with a nice crease in the pants as the brass will be out in force at work. I woke from my nap to the sounds of a  downpour and I suddenly remembered my pants and polo shirt drying outside. Too late! I put them in the dryer while I showered and they were still nice and damp. Nothing a  brisk ride to work wouldn't dry ( though the collar is still damp three hours later). I buttoned up the shutters on the door and noticed my last pair of pink Crocs sitting forlornly outside the now impenetrable house. So I tossed them in the car on my way to the Vespa.

The Vespa is a great tool for this kind of situation and it would be better had I remembered to fill a five gallon jug of gas so I could refuel at home...But it will be easy to park in a semi-protected spot at work, it will dodge debris lying in the road after the storm (if it doesn't drown) and it's fun to ride on empty roads in glorious sunshine.

The cars strung out on high ground have multiplied in number along the Overseas Highway. This lot are parked on the hump over the entrance to the Boca Chica Navy Base. Who knows it may be a great idea! That's the thing about hurricanes: everyone pretends there's a science to survival but its all blind luck.

North Roosevelt Boulevard was deserted for long minutes as I rode into Key West shortly before seven yesterday evening. The scene was eerie along the main road into town:

And when I got to work Nick and I took over from Keith and Kristi who are covering days shift. Then the captain gave me the great news.

Winds are not expected Friday so I get to go home and Do IT All Again! Fantastic! This time I'll lock my Crocs safely in the house when I leave for work not expecting to return.